Services delivered by providers of networked application services, by their nature, span a variety of provider and customer owned and managed infrastructures. For example, the application services begin at a provider or customer owned hosting platform within a provider or customer owned data center infrastructure, travel across one or more wide-area networks (WANs) owned and managed by one or more service providers and across one or more customer owned WAN and LAN infrastructures, before reaching a customer-owned desktop or mobile computing platform.
As application traffic traverses service boundaries between the source provider and infrastructure supplier providers and source provider and customers, the source provider's ability to effect overall service-levels is greatly diminished. Because there is no application-aware demarcation point that aligns with the source provider's service boundary, there is no easy way to establish an actionable service-level agreement. A source provider cannot control the performance of application service over portions of infrastructure it does not own or control.
Current approaches to application performance monitoring and service-level management measure end-to-end (server to desktop) performance without regard to the service provider boundaries. This lack of a clear demarcation point between provider and customer impairs the provider's ability to deliver actionable service-level agreements and results in significant service costs in mediating between provider and customer for infrastructure-induced performance problems.